Bivariate Poisson and Diagonal Inflated Bivariate Poisson Regression Models in R

Abstract

In this paper we present an R package called bivpois for maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of bivariate and diagonal inflated bivariate Poisson regression models. An Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is implemented. Inflated models allow for modelling both over-dispersion (or under-dispersion) and negative correlation and thus they are appropriate for a wide range of applications. Extensions of the algorithms for several other models are also discussed. Detailed guidance and implementation on simulated and real data sets using bivpois package is provided.